Spotted: A Chat with Web Design Agency Dom & Tom

Dom & Tom is the end-to-end digital product development studio that specializes in all things web and mobile. With around 70 talented team members, Dom & Tom has created over 200+ web projects and 70+ apps for top enterprise clients to leading start-ups. The 6 year old agency is growing quickly and now has offices in three major U.S. cities. If that resume doesn’t get you to read more, I don’t know what will.

To learn more about what Dom & Tom’s agency culture, client list, and most recognized work, then keep scrolling…

Company Mantra: “Do Good. Be Good. Have Fun. Have Passion. Be A Community. Make Progress.”

Does your agency have a cool origin story?

Twin brothers and Co-founders Dom & Tom didn’t always work together as two heads of a single robot. In their college years, Dom focused on coding and his interest in theater while Tom explored ways to excel in business. In 2009, when the two were just a few years out of college, the brothers realized that if they were to join forces to build a company, Tom could work hard as an entrepreneur while Dom could provide the technical expertise. After a lot of collaboration, strategy and conceptualization between the two, Dom & Tom was born.

Around that time, mobile application development had truly started to boom. One of the company’s first initiatives was to set up a workshop to teach people about iOS. That single workshop was impetus for some of the company’s biggest clients to begin to court Dom & Tom, and we still work with several of these businesses today.

By late 2010, business was booming, and the brothers asked their younger sibling Joe to help move some boxes with them as they formally set up shop in New York. That trip shifted Joe’s trajectory, as he went there as a box mover and returned to Chicago as a Dom & Tom project manager. Dom & Tom was expanding to become a family business, and with the addition of another project manager and a few more team members, the company was truly starting to grow.

Flash forward 6 years later and Dom & Tom is proud to say we’ve established offices in 3 U.S. cities (New York, Chicago and Los Angeles) with employees working remotely in Columbia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Russia, Serbia, Switzerland and the Philippines. The foundation of our business remains the same: to work with our friends and family and come together to create awesome products for amazing clients.

Most interesting physical thing in your office?

We can’t choose just one! In our New York office we have a large framed photo of our founders Dom & Tom as young Chicagoan boys. Also in our New York office we have a giant robot costume that has withstood years of company functions where countless clients, friends and colleagues have tried it on. In our Chicago office we have a branded retro PAC-MAN cocktail arcade machine that is loved by all.

What does #agencylife mean to you?

“Do Good, Be Good.” When you do good work, you are being good – to your people, your clients, and yourself.

“We believe in the person behind the product as much as the product itself.”

In 10 Words or Less, What We Do for Our Clients:

3 Characteristics We Look for in Potential Clients:

Passion for their Product.

Hardworking Collaborators.

Mutual Respect.

Our Clients Love Us Because:

Our clients respect our level of experience, our passion and the fact that we have the skills and the ability to bring their ideas to life. We unite the disciplines of design, strategy and development to assure that everyone collaborating on a project has a voice. We respond quickly and maintain open lines of communication and are able to pivot in a new direction if need be.

“Within seconds, people must be able to understand the value you’re going to provide them.”

The #1 Thing We Love About Web Design:

A website or app is an artistic medium and is fundamentally the digital footprint for a company. The design of a website is what draws people to it by telling a compelling story and about bringing the brand experience to life.

Is there a web campaign from the last year that inspired you or a classic campaign that you draw inspiration from?

CNN Political Candidate Quiz: We designed a political quiz with CNN. The campaign was built to help create an engaging and educational experience for identifying yourself with political candidates by focusing on the issues. We love this campaign because it focused on helping users navigate through the complex issues associated with the presidential campaign in a fun and engaging manner. Taking complex issues, simplifying them, and generating an engaging user interface for a wide array of platforms is what we love to do most. This was a responsive web app, embedded into the CNN website. We also had to create various experiences for the primaries and general election. So there were a lot of challenges with scaling the number of candidates and tweaking the scoring system and backend game logic. It didn’t hurt that the team at CNN was a blast to work with.

What is the one web design project you are proudest of? Why?

GE Intelligent Platforms: Monitoring & Analysis Snapshot. The General Electric, Intelligent Platforms team has software that monitors, reports and predicts issues on large industrial equipment around the globe. Their team came to Dom & Tom to develop a web application that would aggregate and graphically display data and insights about their prominent “catches of the week” in regards to predicting breakdowns in industrial equipment – saving the industry time and money. We worked with General Electric to construct and implement an intuitive animated front-end that graphically displays their data. Designed and built with a modern tech stack, the app is able to support various devices, browsers and potentially into a 3D experience. It was a pleasure to work with such a great team and GE showcased v1 at their annual meeting to a very warm reception.

If different from above, what is the most recognized web work you have done? Tell us a bit about it.

As you can imagine, the entire team at Dom & Tom was geeked out to work on PowerRangers.com, bringing everyone back to a child-like state. We redesigned and rebuilt the Power Ranger site for the release of a new series and a new movie. The site required a lot of expertise on the DevOps front due to the heavy amount of traffic it receives and the large images it required. The website manages high traffic composed of hundreds of thousands of uniques and impressions; scaling impressively with a content delivery network, continuous integration and deployment, and distribution of systems – all easily updated through a WordPress admin panel. Visually, It’s a lot of fun… I mean, it’s Power Rangers!

Which one to three brands need to redesign their website?

Which one to three brands have a great website?

What is one thing people don’t know about web design that they should know?

We can easily say that web design is not as easy as people believe it to be and the reality is it isn’t easy! It is not just “plug and play” and is certainly not easy to do. Web design is like a 3- dimensional puzzle in that it has to work on multiple devices, 4 if you include other languages, 5 if you include the deaf and 6 if you include the blind. Essentially, turning it into a 6-dimensional puzzle and more complex than a regular user could imagine.

Daniel is THE marketing guru at Agency Spotter. He holds a degree in Journalism from Georgia State University and has worked in the startup world ever since graduating. When Daniel isn't tearing up the marketing scene, you can usually find him playing basketball or enjoying a delicious bowl of Chipotle...

Who is searching for agencies and design firms?

Join more than 20,000 professionals a month searching for agency partners. 70% are from small and medium sized companies. 30% are from the largest companies in the world. Searches are made from more than 100 countries each month too.